FCRONTAB(5) FCRONTAB(5) NAME fcrontab - tables for driving fcron DESCRIPTION A fcrontab is a file containing all tables used by the fcron(8) daemon. In other words, it is the means for a user to tell the daemon "execute this command at this moment". Each user has their own fcrontab, whose commands are executed as their owner (only root can run a job as another using the option runas (see below)). Blank lines, line beginning by a hash sign (#) (which are considered comments), leading blanks and tabs are ignored. Each line in a fcrontab file can be either o an environment setting, o an option setting, o entries based on elapsed system up time, o entries based on absolute time (like normal crontab entries), or o entries run periodically. Any logical line (an entry or an assignment) can be divided into several real lines (the lines which end by a newline character) by placing a backslash (\) before the newline character (\n). THE ENVIRONMENT SETTINGS The environment settings are of the form name = value where the blanks around equal-sign (=) are ignored and optional. Trailing blanks are also ignored, but you can place the value in quotes (simple or double, but matching) to preserve any blanks in the value. When fcron executes a command, it always sets USER, and HOME as defined in /etc/passwd for the owner of the fcrontab from which the command is extracted. TZ is also defined to the value of the option timezone when this option is used. It also defines SHELL to the value of the SHELL used to run the command. Fcron uses the value of SHELL from the fcrontab if any, otherwise it uses the value from fcron.conf if any, or in last resort the value from /etc/passwd. HOME and SHELL may be overridden by settings in the fcrontab, but USER may not. Every other environment assignments defined in the user fcrontab are then made, and the command is executed. By default, fcron will send emails using the email "Content-Type:" header of "text/plain" with the "charset=" parameter set to the charmap / codeset of the locale in which fcron(8) is started up - i.e. either the default system locale, if no LC_* environment variables are set, or the locale specified by the LC_* environment variables (see locale(7)). You can use different character encodings for emailed fcron job output by setting the CONTENT_TYPE and CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in fcrontabs, to the correct values of the mail headers of those names. Additionally, the special variables MAILFROM and MAILTO allow you to tell fcron from/to whom it should email the command's output. Note that these are in fact equivalent to global declarations of the options mailfrom and mailto (see below). They are used for backward compatibility, and it is recommended that you use the options mailfrom and mailto directly instead. ENTRIES BASED ON ELAPSED SYSTEM UP TIME Jobs are scheduled to run once every m minutes of fcron's execution (which is normally the same as m minutes of system's execution). The time a system is suspended (to memory or disk) is considered as down time. To configure such a job, use configuration lines of the form: @options frequency command where frequency is a time value of the form value*multiplier+value*multiplier+...+value-in-minutes as "12h02" or "3w2d5h1". The first means "12 hours and 2 minutes of fcron execution" while the second means "3 weeks, 2 days, 5 hours and 1 minute of fcron execution". The only valid multipliers are: "VALID TIME MULTIPLIERS" meaning: multipliers: months (4 weeks): m weeks (7 days): w days (24 hours): d hours (60 minutes): h seconds: s In place of options, user can put a time value: it will be interpreted as @first(